POOR, POOR JACK

Age Range: 5 - 7

Pub Date: Jan. 11th, 2012Publisher: Rattledash Media

A resolution isn’t all that’s missing from this distinctly handcrafted episode.

Narrated in a dryly amused tone by the author and supplied with loud, comical sound effects, the tale features a jack-o’-lantern. Disappointed when he’s not sold by Halloween, he tries out alternate careers as a jalapeño pepper, a grape picker, a “fireman” (no firefighters here, evidently) and a soldier. Failing at all these, he’s at last adopted by a young girl—but then he overhears her mother planning a pumpkin pie and is last seen bouncing away down the road. Looking like a paper cutout and placed atop a succession of blurry Photoshopped backdrops, Jack turns various colors as he goes and can be made to bounce a little, swell slightly, roll and utter occasional words with a touch. Readers uninvolved in his plight (which will be most of them) can also move 10 cupcakes around at random on one screen, call up snatches of mariachi music on another, set a fly in motion and like irrelevancies.

Droll as far as it goes, but unfinished of plot and endowed with special effects that are, at best, nondescript. (iPad storybook app. 5-7)